Page:Castlemon--Joe Wayring at Home.djvu/385

 "Oh, I don't hurt them any. I only shoot at them. I never killed any thing."

"That's just what Mr. Brown said when he sold you," thought I. "Have you a dog to guard your camp? Well, you ought to have. Matt Coyle lives up there, and night before last he made a daring attempt to steal this skiff, and then he tried to sink her. Don't you see the hole in her side?"

I was going on to tell the double barrel that if his master did not keep his eyes open he might expect another visit from the squatter, but just then I saw Joe Wayring and his friends coming down the bank; and as I was more interested in them and the rods they carried on their shoulders, than I was in the fortunes of the seedy-looking fowling piece, I had nothing more to say to him. I saw him once afterward, and then he was a perfect wreck of a gun. There wasn't enough of him left to sell for old iron.

"Haw! haw!" said Roy, as he jumped into the skiff. "We've got them back again, and only one of them is the worse for being stolen by that squatter."